The perfect novel from which to make a movie is, I think, not the novel of
action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the
inner life of its characters. It will give the adaptor an absolute compass
bearing, as it were, on what a character is thinking or feeling at any
given moment of the story. And from this he can invent action which will
be an objective correlative of the book's psychological content, will
accurately dramatise this in an implicit, off-the-nose way without
resorting to having the actors deliver literal statements of meaning.

I think that for a movie or a play to say anything really truthful
about life, it has to do so very obliquely, so as to avoid all pat
conclusions and neatly tied-up ideas. The point of view it is conveying
has to be completely entwined with a sense of life as it is, and has to be
got across through a subtle injection into the audience's consciousness.
Ideas which are valid and truthful are so multi-faceted that they don't
yield themselves to frontal assault. The ideas have to be discovered by
the audience, and their thrill in making the discovery makes those ideas
all the more powerful. You use the audience's thrill of surprise and
discovery to reinforce your ideas, rather than reinforce them artificially
through plot points or phoney drama or phoney stage dynamics put in to
power them across.

It's sometimes said that a great novel makes a less promising basis for
a film than a novel which is merely good. I don't think that adapting
great novels presents any special problems which are not involved in
adapting good novels or mediocre novels; except that you will be more
heavily criticised if the film is bad, and you may be even if it's good. I
think almost any novel can be successfully adapted, provided it is not one
whose aesthetic integrity is lost along with its length. For example, the
kind of novel in which a great deal and variety of action is absolutely
essential to the story, so that it loses much of its point when you
subtract heavily from the number of events or their development. People
have asked me how it is possible to make a film out of Lolita when
so much of the quality of the book depends on Nabokov's prose style. But
to take the prose style as any more than just a part of a great book is
simply misunderstanding just what a great book is. Of course, the quality
of the writing is one of the elements that make a novel great. But this
quality is a result of the quality of the writer's obsession with his
subject, with a theme and a concept and a view of life and an
understanding of character. Style is what an artist uses to fascinate the
beholder in order to convey to him his feelings and emotions and thoughts.
These are what have to be dramatised, not the style. The dramatising has
to find a style of its own, as it will do if it really grasps the content.
And in doing this it will bring out another side of that structure which
has gone into the novel. It may or may not be as good as the novel;
sometimes it may in certain ways be even better.

Oddly enough, acting comes into the picture somewhere here. At its
best, realistic drama consists of a progression of moods and feelings that
play upon the audience's feelings and transform the author's meaning into
an emotional experience. This means that the author must not think of
paper and ink and words as being his writing tools, but rather that he
works in flesh and feeling. And in this sense I feel that too few writers
seem to understand what an actor can communicate emotionally and what he
cannot. Often, at one point, the writer expects a silent look to get
across what it would take a rebus puzzle to explain, and in the next
moment the actor is given a long speech to convey something that is quite
apparent in the situation and for which a brief look would be sufficient.
Writers tend to approach the creation of drama too much in terms of words,
failing to realise that the greatest force they have is the mood and
feeling they can produce in the audience through the actor. They tend to
see the actor grudgingly, as someone likely to ruin what they have
written, rather than seeing that the actor is in every sense their medium.

You might wonder, as a result of this, whether directing was anything
more or less than a continuation of the writing. I think that is precisely
what directing should be. It would follow, then, that a writer-director is
really the perfect dramatic instrument; and the few examples we have where
these two peculiar techniques have been properly mastered by one man have,
I believe, produced the most consistently fine work.

When the director is not his own author, I think it is his duty to be
one hundred per cent faithful to the author's meaning and to sacrifice
none of it for the sake of climax or effect. This seems a fairly obvious
notion, yet how many plays and films have you seen where the experience
was exciting and arresting but when it was over you felt there was less
there than met the eye? And this is usually due to artificial stimulation
of the senses by technique which disregards the inner design of the play.
It is here that we see the cult of the director at its worst.

On the other hand, I don't want to imply rigidity. Nothing in making
movies gives a greater sense of elation than participation in a process of
allowing the work to grow, through vital collaboration between script,
director and actors, as it goes along. Any art form properly practised
involves a to and fro between conception and execution, the original
intention being constantly modified as one tries to give it objective
realisation. In painting a picture this goes on between the artist and his
canvas; in making a movie it goes on between people.

The preceding article appeared in the journal Sight & Sound,
vol.30 (1960/61), p.14. Used by Permission; All Rights Reserved.